Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Thai military: Haha, just kidding, it’s a coup.

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So much for insisting earlier this week that they were just imposing martial law and not overthrowing the government. It’s officially now a coup:

Thailand’s military has announced it is taking control of the government and has suspended the constitution.

In a TV statement, army chief Gen Prayuth Chan-ocha vowed to restore order and enact political reforms.

The cabinet has been told to report to the military, TV broadcasting is suspended and political gatherings are banned. A nationwide curfew will operate from 22:00 to 05:00 local time.
[…]
On Tuesday the army imposed martial law. Talks were then held between the main political factions, but the army announced the coup on Thursday.

Political party leaders, including opposition leader Suthep Thaugsuban, were taken away from the talks venue after troops sealed off the area.

 
Foreign media are reporting very rapid consolidation of power and the army focusing on breaking up protest camps in support of the government, even though the opposition protesters have been obstructing everything for six months.

The military is traditionally aligned with the faction currently in the opposition and last overthrew the ruling coalition during the 2006 coup. By some reckonings, this makes military coup number 19 since absolute monarchy ended in 1932.

The military leadership claims the coup was a necessary step because the elected government did not want to step down as part of crisis talks. All the political representatives were detained and carried off to barracks when talks failed to make progress, before the coup was announced.

GOP working hard to make sure Dems fully united in 2016

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Screen capped this from the top of Google News yesterday. It’s a pretty good summary of where the Republican top brass is right now:
Screenshot2014-05-18at4.45.37PM
From the people who brought you an ancient, walking future health emergency with anger management issues as their nominee six years ago comes… rampant, idle, and sexist speculation based on nothing!

At the rate they’re going with these absurd attacks, even the Anti-Hillary Democrats will be willing to walk through a field of land mines to get to the voting booth to elect her in November 2016.

8mm film clip shows FDR walking at 1937 All-Star Game

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Every so often, post-polio FDR made public appearances where he was standing or walking, with support — and in great pain. We know, for example, that his son helped walk him to the lectern in 1932 to become the first presidential candidate ever to accept the party’s nomination in person. But the above clip may be one of the few times captured on film — and possibly the largest number of people he ever walked in front of publicly.

The 8mm footage comes from the personal collection of former Major League Baseball player Jimmie DeShong, who apparently filmed it himself at the 1937 All-Star Game in Washington D.C. The media rarely even showed the president’s wheelchair, let alone his agonizing walking, although he tended not to conceal it when interacting with people in person in small settings. The film has just been donated to the state of Pennsylvania.

You can also see photos of his leg braces, wheelchair, and specially modified car — tools that he used to work with his disability — from the FDR Library website.
fdr-walking

Alt-history novelists have got nothing on Cliven Bundy

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Cliven Bundy, anti-government rancher and political theorist extraordinaire, has been releasing videos with even more information on his extremely “unique” view of American — and indeed Western — history and the American social contract. Buzzfeed collected some of the “best of” made-up facts from Bundy’s video.

My favorite is:

They [the Pilgrims] had a central government, which was Europe. Was the strongest army in the world. And they ruled with unlimited power. And there was a point that they decided they wasn’t going to live that way any more. And so they had a revolution.

 
This and others are so amazingly off-base I’m not sure I could have intentionally made up alternative history this great as a joke. (Long-time readers may recall my extensive alt-history-based satire, before this site or SBBS existed.)

To recap: This man — who is trying to argue based on an arcane and incorrect legal theory that the Federal government can’t make him pay to graze cattle on Federally-managed public lands — literally believes the 1620 Pilgrims had a revolution (in 1776? — unclear) and flat-earth-sailed to America, because they needed to escape a totalitarian government that ruled over all of Europe with a massive army. And somehow, despite a total lack of knowledge on the country’s actual history to the point of not knowing facts the rest of us learned in elementary school, he is a “patriot.”

Somewhere in the afterlife, Oliver Cromwell (England’s real-life dictator from 1653-1658, long after the Pilgrims had left and long before King George III reigned) is silently weeping at the thought of how much phenomenal power he would have had in the 17th century Bundiverse.

1651 Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan" on the English Civil War and the proper form of government.

1651 Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” on the English Civil War and the proper form of government.

Thailand protests now target generic prime minister in abstract

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I’ve said it before but: Thailand keeps reminding me a lot of U.S. politics these days…

The opposition party leaders orchestrated protests for almost half a year specifically demanding that Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra be removed — supposedly because she was a front operation for her brother, the former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was himself removed by a military coup in 2006. Supposedly, these were sincere protests all about the two of them.

But the same week she was forced by the courts to resign on flimsy charges, they immediately start protesting for the removal of caretaker Prime Minister Fill-in-the-Blank. Basically didn’t even matter who it was.

As we’ve known all along the protest leaders were full of it. Their street members had always made clear to the media that this was never about the Shinawatras personally and was always about the fact they stay losing fair elections since 1992.

When you keep losing elections, it must be the democracy that’s broken, rather than your own mind-blowingly out-of-touch lack of mass appeal outside your own immediate base.

Maybe the opposition should stop constantly mocking, belittling, and denigrating the voters who make up 70% of the electorate and then saying the votes must have been bought because a majority of the voters won’t vote for you. Just a thought.

Oh well, time to remove the next poor fellow and continue blocking anyone from voting in new elections. People who don’t vote for conservatives who “know best” don’t deserve to vote anyway! It’s a privilege, not a right! And if conservatives don’t win every time (or, in Thailand’s case, ever), then no one should be allowed to vote at all.

You stay bitter, Bangkok.

Homs falls, end of Syria war near?

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The two-year siege of the rebel “capital” in Syria ends in government victory as the city of Homs falls, quietly. UN-escorted busloads of rebel fighters from several factions retreated northward safely with families, in exchange for lifting two rebel sieges on Shia cities in another part of the country.

This civil war definitely looks like it’s almost over, as has been increasingly frequently suggested in world media.

Thailand: Coup by Court

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thailand-flag-200Thailand high court pulls a “Tenure of Office Act” like the 1868 U.S. House and says the Prime Minister has to leave office because she wasn’t allowed to fire some official and did anyway. Talk about fishing for reasons to remove someone so the military doesn’t have to.

The Thai elites and opposition are really not on board with representative democracy are they?